Word: aback
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...Chinese authorities have traditionally been wary of public protests, and they may have been taken aback by the intensity of the protesters' passions. "They never expected so many people to show up," says a top aide to the Shanghai municipal government. "It scared them to see how quickly crowds can form." Another district aide says, "The leaders are nervous. They are doing everything to stop protests from happening again." The strategy worked in 1989, when Shanghai's leaders avoided a fiasco similar to Beijing's Tiananmen Massacre by persuading students to return to their dorms for the sake...
...should understand the principle of blind justice better than Attorney General Edwin Meese. Still, he may have been slightly taken aback when he learned that a warrant for his arrest had been issued. Meese's trouble started two weeks ago, when a municipal court clerk in Los Angeles accidentally discovered the five-year-old warrant while scanning computer records. The top cop, it seems, had committed the crime of jaywalking in 1980, right in front of Ronald Reagan's California campaign headquarters. His fine: $10. When Meese, then Reagan's chief of staff, did not pay the penalty, it automatically...
Carter—a fellow and adjunct lecturer at the Center for Business and Government and Center for Public Leadership at KSG—offered few specifics about his plans for the NYSE, but he did say that he was not taken aback by the board’s decision to elect him as the new chairman...
...likely to have at his homes in New York and Oxfordshire, England. That amounts to a lifestyle that few would ever plan for, and Stringer certainly didn't. He told TIME last week that when Idei first called him with the suggestion of the new job, he was taken aback. "I had not considered that a likely alternative," Stringer said. No shame in that. Nor had anyone else...
When my mom called to say she had something for me, the thought of baked goods popped into mind. Later on, when she dropped off not a brownie but a book, I was taken aback. She expects me to read a non-school book in the middle of the semester...